15 online marketing blogs you need to follow

One great way to keep your mind and ideas constantly refreshing is to read fantastic ideas from experienced people and get inspiration from them.

With so much expertise available online completely free, through the blogs of experts in making money online, it's really criminal if you don't take advantage of that expertise.

To inspire you to create your own list of killer blogs, I'm putting down my elite list right here for you to see. These are the people and companies who inspire me all the time to continue doing my best work and develop my business further and faster than I could ever dream.

If you don't already have a list of blogs you follow, why not use my elite list as a base, and then seek out some to complement it within your own area of interest?

One tip I have for you is to use an RSS reader to manage consuming the fresh content from your list of elite blogs. Although RSS has a bit of a bad reputation, you can get free RSS readers for desktop PCs, and also RSS apps for use on tablets and phones.

Using an RSS reader, you can always be sure you will be made aware when fresh content is posted, as well as being sure that you can read it instantly using the RSS reader, without having to trawl through a list of different URL's.

I should state that these are in no particular order, so a blog being higher in my list does not mean I am recommending it to you as a priority. Each is useful for different areas of expertise, and it's more about creating a high quality, relevant blend of information to receive so that you get an all round boost in your mindset, idea generation and productivity.

Without doubt, Seth Godin is one of the most influential people in modern marketing. He is the author of 17 books which deal with leadership, marketing, innovation, change and quitting what you like.

As well as being a highly influential marketer, Seth is also the founder of Squidoo.com, which you will probably know is the original innovative third-party “Web 2.0” site builder.

His blog delivers a daily dose of thought provocation. Covering topics across the spectrum, each one is designed to place a seed in your brain. Whether you nurture that seed and let it grow, or ignore it and let it die is up to you.

Marie is acknowledged as one of the worlds top marketing and lifestyle experts. Rubbing shoulders with people such as Oprah Winfrey, Richard Branson and Tony Robbins has helped to increase people's perception of that claim.

On her website you can find inspirational written content, as well as a weekly video show which is seen by thousands of people.

If you want to see how someone can market themselves and their business to appeal almost universally, then Marie's site is well worth following.

Derek Halpern specialises in helping you to learn ways to get people to take notice of you, and to do business with you.

His video blog content covers topics around getting more customers, persuading people to work with you, negotiation skills, pricing profitability, and generally help you to get ahead in life and work.

So social triggers, both through its video and written blog content, is about social engineering, social interaction and psychology. Wherever you are in business, it's well worth consuming his content and acting on the seeds he sows.

Infinite conversions is a company with one goal: to get you more conversions. So their blog is packed full of information about conversion rate analysis to help you get more business.

If you are looking for a blog which deals with hard information on optimising sales funnels, gaining and retaining customers, and focusing your mind on what really matters in terms of online business conversion, then this is a blog you need to follow.

Neil Patel has created brands such as Quicksprout, Crazy Egg, KISSmetrics and the Hello Bar. You may not realise just how influential some of these things have been on the success of many websites in the past few years.

The Quicksprout blog deals with key marketing, search engine optimisation and branding topics. As it's written by an expert who's been there and done it, you know you can trust the quality of what you are reading.

As well as the blog, there are also links to view the Quicksprout guides to many key topics. Even if you had not been aware who Quicksprout are, you have probably seen these guides somewhere during your online travels.

“5 years ago I felt impressed to start a blog with a funny name—The Sales Lion. I didn’t know what it would become. I certainly didn’t know it would grow into the business and company it is today. And the truth is, I still don’t know what it will eventually be.”

If ever there was evidence that rather than looking for the perfect idea, you just need to have an idea and go for it, then “The Sales Lion” encapsulates it perfectly. It's certainly the strategy that forms the basis of how I operate my business and encourage people who I work with to adopt.

Search engine optimisation, blogging, marketing, social media marketing, it's all there. The team behind The Sales Lion are also all experts in using Hubspot's marketing software suite, and regularly blog on making the most of it.

The company blog follows the main topicality of the company itself. ConversionXL are experts in improving conversion rates. They specialise in researching and experimenting to squeeze every last drop out of the potential customer base.

The owner Peep Laja describes himself as a "conversion optimisation junkie", and the topics discussed on the blog reflect this speciality. Their blog content is always highly practical, packed with real-world examples and stuffed full of actionable information.

Copyblogger is the most influential sales copywriting website in the world. As well as pure sales copywriting, it also now regularly covers the broader topics of content marketing and general content writing.

The founder, Brian Clark, set the site up in 2006. Since then it has become a massively influential website, spawning other ventures such as the very widely used Genesis WordPress framework.

If you are looking for blog that can give you regular information, education and inspiration around what and how you write, then you need to look no further.

Ryan holiday is the former director of marketing for American apparel. He is now an author, writer and marketer. He also advises and works with many authors, including people such as Tim Ferriss, author of the four hour work week.

The content on his blog tends to be aspirational and inspirational, rather than around hard strategies.

But don't let this put you off, his positive ethos and ideas around creating a positive environment to thrive in make this an invaluable resource to consider following.

Video fruit is a fantastic blog that deals with many general topics around running an online business.

From how to get more social traffic, through to managing an email list, it's all highly practical stuff.

One thing I particularly like about the company blog is that the people who run it and write it are active in the comments. There's nothing worse than taking the time to contribute to a blog, to find nobody ever shows an interest in what you have written.

Natalie Sisson is a former executive who calls herself the suitcase entrepreneur. She is allegedly homeless, and travels from destination to destination, seeing the world and working from wherever she is.

She also apparently has bank accounts in four countries, as well as 17 different SIM cards for her mobile phone.

Her blog is gold dust for people who want to see how somebody lives in different places, but still makes a fantastic living. Having both financial and physical freedom means that she can live the life she wants.

The content is partly written by her, and partly by guest bloggers. The topics vary wildly between aspirational and highly detailed strategy content. If you are looking for a bit of inspiration mixed with hard facts, Natalie's blog is for you.

Ramit Sethi's speciality is encouraging people to become entrepreneurs. His blog posts are essential reading if you want to be challenged on how you are approaching your attempts to make money.

The topics he generally covers include motivation, starting up your own business, and personal development. So it's really useful around all areas relating to starting your own profitable lifestyle business.

Unbounce are lead conversion specialists, who have a team of people with incredible expertise at creating landing pages that work.

Their conversion rate expertise carries through into the company blog. Topics such as lead generation, split testing and idea validation will be very useful to anyone who is starting on the journey to making profitable online business.

What's really great about the Unbounce blog is that the posts are highly detailed. They are stuffed full of details, examples and graphics to help you fully appreciate the points being made. As with the other great blogs out there, the authors are also very good at discussing points made in the comments.

The ethos behind Zen Habits is on clearing away the things that are not important your life so that you can focus on what really matters.

As such, it's not a marketing blog, but it does something arguably far more important. It allows you to consider and adopt principles that will remove things from your life that will then allow you to focus on becoming more productive and successful.

So it underpins everything talked about in the other 14 blogs I have listed for you here. Listed in Time magazine as one of the top 25 blogs in the world, the concepts discussed by Leo Babuata really are incredibly powerful, and simple.

That's why it's made it into my list of 15 online marketing blog you need to follow. Not because it's about marketing, but because if you adopt the principles outlined then you will become far more successful than you would otherwise be.

So there you have it, my 15 online marketing blogs need to follow, outlined for you in detail. I really do urge you to follow all 15 and read every piece of new content they throw at you. Drink this stuff up, its nectar for success.

And if you think I've missed an even more amazing online marketing blog, then be sure to let me know in the comments so that we can all discover it.

Success starts with you. But unless you know how successful people think and act, unless you know what principles and strategies they have running through their veins, then you will not be able to develop your own style that encompasses the best of what successful people are telling you works.